


so you created a game and you called it seduction, now let's break all the rules

by kwritten



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hogwarts Sixth Year, Seduction, background Draco Malfoy, implied Pansy/Draco
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:36:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's nearing the end of Sixth year and everyone's eyes are on Blaise, wondering what side of the war he's going to fall on, but all he's interested in is his own game. (There's always one exception.)</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Okay so he’s a drowning man and he’s trying to drag her away from a sinking ship that she’s clinging to with bleeding fingers and screams that echo across the sky, so what.</i></p><p>
  <i>So that doesn’t make him a hero or a martyr. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>It doesn’t even spell out love like the poets would want you to think. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>It mostly makes him stupid. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>He can live with that.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	so you created a game and you called it seduction, now let's break all the rules

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



“One of these days you’re going to have to pick a side,” her eyes are red, hair wild, voice shrill and cracking. 

She cries a lot more now, she thinks she hides it, she thinks he doesn’t see the desperation oozing out of her because everyone else is too wrapped up in the oncoming war, but he’s too practiced in the art of weakness to ignore hers. He shrugs at her from the low sofa he’s sprawled on in in the corner of the library – far enough away from Draco and his cronies to not be involved, but close enough to _appear_ involved. She’s right, in a way, it’s a fine line that he’s treading. His gaze drifts away from her, to Duncan Keith in the corner, a smile curling at his lips when the boy blushes. 

Pansy moves to impede his view, “You can’t fuck your way out of everything,” she hisses at him. 

“You should know,” he examines his fingernails dismissively. “Tell me, is Malfoy’s cock really worth it? Boy must cum pure liquid gold to keep someone like you panting after his every idiotic word.”

Her eyes are narrowed in confusion, almost like she caught the subtle compliment for what it was, when a group of chattering Hufflepuffs skirted around the edge of Draco’s sullen, whispering group. Blaise flicked his eyes over at them and crooked one finger slowly. 

“There’s no need to be so crass,” she’s saying as plump little Anika slides into Blaise’s lap. 

Anika laughs, placing a kiss on the corner of his lips (the gesture causes Pansy to pale slightly, which he takes as the triumph that it is), “You’ve been living in the same House as this ass for years and you haven’t figured out that everything _must_ be crass?” She fixes her gaze on Pansy, eyebrows raised. 

Blaise slides his fingers up Anika’s skirt under her robes, stroking her inner thigh lazily, watching Pansy’s throat as she swallows nervously. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Duncan leave in a huff, he smiles. 

“Draco isn’t an idiot,” Pansy hisses. And his grip tightens on Anika’s flesh, annoyance hitting him like a train. “He’s made a choice, he’s thinking about his future – about everyone’s future.”

Anika’s heart quickens, and it has nothing to do with his fingers on her skin. Her mother is a Muggle-born witch. She turns her head and takes his earlobe between his teeth. “I’m bored,” she breathes huskily. 

He turns from Pansy into Anika’s waiting mouth gratefully, her lips cool and soft against his own. Pansy leaves with a snort of disgust. Blaise focuses on the scent and taste and feel of something beneath, above him, shutting out the sounds of whispers and the lingering sense of dread and waiting that has permeated the castle all year. Whatever will come, will come. 

After a few moments, he can feel Anika pushing away and he grips her tighter, kisses more roughly. Okay so he’s a drowning man clinging to a life preserver that can only sink along with him but refuses to let go, so what? Anika smiles against his lips, “She’s gone, you can let go now.”

Blaise leans his head back against the arm of the sofa and looks up at her steadily, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Anika rolls her eyes, she’s known him too long, played this game with him too many times. Some boys play chess, Blaise plays something harder, something meaner, and Anika is one of his favorite partners. She comes with the crook of his finger and he follows with just a wink from her. “This one isn’t going to play by the normal rules,” she smooths down her skirt and wraps her long robes back over her bare legs, swatting his lingering hands away. “I can’t help you this time.”

 _The risk is too great._ It’s there in her eyes, pleading him to let her go. 

Or to stay, maybe. 

To play a new game. 

_Come with me?_ It’s there in her fingers trailing up his arm and back again, daring him to choose. 

There are no safe sides anymore. 

“Duncan ran off in a huff,” Blaise ignores her unspoken question for just a little while longer. “I bet he’d love some of your comfort.”

Anika chuckles and shakes her head, “I’ll let him comfort _me_.” She’s always loved to play the damsel in distress. 

She slips off his lap and looks down at him one last time, “Don’t …” she bites her lip and he can feel it coming, it’s there in her voice. It was almost comical how much he _knew_ her without knowing anything about her really, not her favorite color or how she likes her coffee or what her Muggle cousins’ names are. Just everything in between, the way her body betrays her mind. It would almost be enough for something, if it wasn’t _nothing_ at all. “It’s coming soon,” she says with a whisper, turning away from him and making her way out the door, instead of what he knows she’s thinking. 

What they are all thinking. 

_One of these days, you’ll have to pick a side._

 

Pansy is alone in the common room when he wanders in from his room around two in the morning. Sometimes the house elves leave treats by the fireplace for late-night study groups and the occasional insomniac wanderer. He’d like everyone to think that he knows this for different reasons than why he does. 

It’s something in the middle, his reality. Somewhere between the boy who can’t sleep and the boy who always _sleeps_ elsewhere is his truth. He despises all three versions, clings to them despite his best efforts to rip them from his mind. 

Pansy is alone in the common room when he wanders in, her red eyes fixed on the fire, her hair loose in long waves down her back. She’s sitting on the floor, curled up into a ball, arms wrapped around her legs. He’s never seen her looking so small. He doesn’t like it, wants her to stand up and shout at him, wants her to sneer and dismiss him the way she does everyone else. 

He’s a drowning man with frozen fingers clinging to a railing and all he wants is for her to slam her feet down on them, breaking him in two, pushing him into the darkness below. 

He pads up next to her and looks down, he doesn’t want to save her, goddamnit. That’s not how this was supposed to work. 

“Get up,” he says harshly, kicking her in the side not too gently. “Get. Up.”

She turns her head to look down at his feet, “Go away.”

“No,” he kicks her again. “Get up.”

 _This is ridiculous._ He doesn’t say.

 _You are worth more than this._ He doesn’t think.

She rests her cheek against her knees and a tear slips down her cheek, “Just leave me alone, Blaise. Run off to one of your whores.”

Something bristles inside of him. 

He should leave, turn around, walk away. 

He should pick a side. 

He crouches down on his heels, beside her, “Why?” It is barely a whisper, it is barely a breath, it is a hiss into the silence that surrounds them. He knows she’ll hear it. He already wished he didn’t ask it.

“Why what?” She’s tired and she’s letting it show and that infuriates him more than anything else he’s seen this term. 

The year is ticking by, slowly counting down to something he isn’t sure he wants to know what. 

“Why …?” 

“Why Draco?” she asks for him. 

He doesn’t say anything. That isn’t the right question, but it’s an easier place to start. 

“Why Draco instead of what… _you_?” she doesn’t sneer, her eyes are wide, looking past him as if he were invisible. 

“Instead of you.”

Okay so he’s a drowning man and he’s trying to drag her away from a sinking ship that she’s clinging to with bleeding fingers and screams that echo across the sky, so what.

So that doesn’t make him a hero or a martyr. 

It doesn’t even spell out love like the poets would want you to think. 

It mostly makes him stupid. 

He can live with that. 

She laughs hoarsely, “Pick _me_ instead of Draco.” It’s the greatest joke of her life, it’s the most sincere question of his. 

He rocks back on his heels a bit and looks at his hands, “Why not?”

“What would that even…?” Pansy shakes her head and sighs. “Please stop acting like a genuine human being and go back to being an asshole, this suit doesn’t fit you well.”

Blaise stands up, “I could say the same thing to you, Parkinson.”

He’s daring her. He holds his breath. 

She doesn’t move.

“Since when does Pansy Parkinson sit in the common room alone crying in the middle of the night like a weak bitch? Since when do you beg for what you want instead of just taking it?”

“And what is that I want?” she surges up, eyes still dead, playacting at fire like no one will notice the difference. Like he won’t. 

“You want to take without asking or apologizing, you want something you shouldn’t have, you want something that feels good.”

He holds his breath while she studies his face, waiting for … something. A rejection? A laugh? Everything?

“And what do you want, Zabini?” She raises one finger and places it against his lips, “I think you want something that hurts, something that leaves scars, something you’d never dare take without asking.” _When all you’ve ever done is take, take, take without apology._

He grabs her hand and pulls it away from his face roughly, “I want something that burns. Not a cold, dead fish wishing I was some twit with a death wish.”

Her eyes flash and he should walk away, should turn on his heels and leave her to her fire and her tears. That’s what she wants, she isn’t the one that came wandering in to his space asking him for something he can’t give. (Not that she would.) (She’s the stronger one, maybe. Maybe sitting in the dark alone next to the fire means that she always had more of it inside than he thought was left behind her dulled eyes. Maybe poking the fire and hoping to catch light from the sparks that fly makes him the weaker one.)

(Oh well.)

She grazes a sharp fingernail down the side of his face and he closes his eyes, letting each cell feel only that gesture, hoping that blood is drawn and hoping no mark is left that he’ll have to explain in the morning. 

“I hate you,” she says and it almost sounds like something else, but it doesn’t and he’s glad. 

“I don’t hate _this_ you,” he says and it almost sounds like a confession. 

She leaves burning scratches on his back with her fingernails, presses him against the cold floor and rides him with her eyes closed as if he isn’t even there – which would bother him if it mattered. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. He flips her over and lifts her knees to his shoulders and she tangles her fingers up in his hair, pulling until tears form in his eyes, burying his face in her neck when he comes and doesn’t even try to hide the way his body shakes in her arms. 

 

In the morning, he sits next to Duncan at the breakfast table and apologizes by whispering dirty secrets in his ear. In the morning, she sits next to Draco and sneers across the hall at the Potter boy and her eyes are full of fire. 

(There’s some satisfaction in that, he takes pride in it even as he slips his tongue over Duncan’s skin in a hidden closet when he should be in Charms.)

(There’s some sadness in that, but he doesn’t feel it.)

 

 _One of these days, you’re going to have to pick a side,_ their eyes say as they follow his path through the halls with one arm wrapped around Lisandra’s waist. 

(He’ll survive and it’s gonna hurt. And he’ll lay his body down to be the fuel for their fire, because that’s the only thing that matters to him in the end. He won’t be left in a world full of hollow people, eyes vacant, lips seeking meaning from his lips. He won’t be left picking up the pieces of broken people. 

He has no use for broken people. 

What’s the use in a soul already broken? What is there left for him to use up? What is there left to take, if there’s nothing of use lingering.

So there’s a war coming. _He pushes his finger inside Lisandra and catches her moan with his mouth._ So that’s a lot of fire that’s going to need fuel.)

 

He winks at Pansy across the dining hall and she sneers at him, eyes lingering at his fingers toying with Anika’s hair. There’s fire in her eyes, energy behind her sneer. 

(The scars on his back scab over.)  
(All evidence disappears in time.)


End file.
